Social Behaviors
Social Behaviors
Interactions within species can impact fitness of all participants.
Learning Objective: Grid the possible impacts of social behaviors on the actor and recipient of the behaviors.
An elephant matriarch, the oldest and dominant female, leads calves and younger female relatives to meet up with another family grouping of elephants. While together, all of the elephants will communicate and eat together.
Social behaviors are the interactions that occur within a species.
This video introduces social behaviors, including how they relate to fitness.
Watch this video; you can select the closed captioning “cc” option if you would like to see the text.
Schooling, or swimming together, is a common social behavior in fish, often when they are young.
What are potential advantages of swimming in a large group?
These three guppies were startled by one of the cats running by. Note how closely they are clustered, with eyes looking in multiple directions.
The slightly smaller fish with a white abdomen is a male. These guppies have been artificially selected to have less sexual dimorphism, but they retain many of their predator-response behaviors.
Two sets of eyes may be better than one. Cleaner shrimp sometimes aggregate together when advertising to fish that they are available to clean. Their behaviors change in a large group in contrast to a solitary shrimp, or a reproductive pair.
Prairie dogs work together to excavate underground burrows, collect food, and watch for predators. This extent of cooperation relies on communication for coordination of activities.
Guard, or sentry, prairie dogs chirp an alarm if a predator approaches the den. This sentry is more likely to get eaten because it is standing and chirping. Which kind of social behavior involves the recipient benefiting but the actor being harmed? ______________ In an evolutionary sense, when might it make sense for an animal to “sacrifice” itself to save others?
Social behaviors are dependent of the transfer of information between individuals. The next section introduces animal communication.
Check your knowledge – Social Behaviors
Review your notes. Can you provide examples of the impact of social behavior on animal fitness? If so, move forward to the next page.
Learning Objective:
Grid the possible impacts of social behaviors on the actor and recipient of the behaviors.
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This Module
9: Why does it behave like this?
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